Tinker it now!

This morning, I stopped by the Central Saint Martins MA Design for Textile Futures final show preview, to see what the future of textiles looks like.

I was impressed. The projects all looked well along their way, especially given that the final show is not until late June, and the students were well spoken. I was quickly steered toward the four projects everyone agreed were interactive (it’s interactive if it has wires), and wandered around for a bit looking at the others.

Textiles and physical computing offer a difficult and a promising combination. Both disciplines share a concern with objects in the world and people’s uses of them, and interesting things can happen when themes around computation, information, networking, esthetics, materials, texture, fashion, etc., run into each other.

This morning, these themes did keep running up against each other, largely to good effect. Overall, there was a lot of emphasis on: sustainability, from reusing and recycling materials to visualizing environmental information onto fabrics and buildings; old-meets-new cultures/methods/technologies; and making textiles that are integrated into and/or responsive to their contexts. Here are a few highlights:

Transducing Textiles
In a fairly classic electronics/network/wearables joining, Liana Nigri Moszkowicz is working on scraping online data to generate patterns on clothing. It’s currently in software-and-projection prototyping, so I am curious to see how she ultimately joins the virtual to the fabric.

Berit Grienke is looking at relationships between textile patterns and sounds and built a machine that looks like a cross between a printer and a loom. A light sensor ‘scans’ a piece of fabric suspended in the machine and uses the patterns of light and dark to generate sound (using Peter Knight’s Auduino code). I can’t quite articulate what I liked so much about this—perhaps that the project, starting with questions about textiles, took a very different shape and built a very different interface than I would expect to arise from a similar project that started with questions about electronics or sound synthesis. Its one of those objects that become possible at the juncture of disciplines.

Home and the Environment
Chloe Albert is building a wall that senses and responds to the presence of volatile organic compounds in the home. When a sensor detects high levels of VOCs, a number of discs on the wall start to move; the discs also contain a carbon fabric that absorbs VOCs, so the movement functions as both an alert and a filter. I like the combination of indication and remediation, and the ambient ‘alarm’ for a non-time-critical contaminant.

On a more decorative front, Lin Yunlien is weaving optical fibers into jellyfish-inspired patterns in curtains and using solar panels, a light sensor, and an LED to collect power during the day and then generate a dimly glowing pattern when it is dark (a curtain/night-light). As with Grienke’s project, the esthetics of working with textiles nicely enhances the electronic interaction.

No Wires, So It Must Not Be Interactive
A few other projects that caught my eye included:

Elisa Strozyk’s Wooden Textiles, tesselated wooden shapes adhered to a fabric backing. Questions around esthetic and practical demands on hybrid objects, and some really nice-looking prototypes.

Eunsuk Hur’s Nomadic Wonderland, small pieces of fabric that can be assembled and disassembled like Legos or Tinker Toys to build clothing, decorations, etc. I liked that they blurred the line between ‘wall hanging’ and ‘clothing,’ and, she had some brilliant photos of her friends user-testing the fabrics and making goofy and playful objects.

And a set of recipe books for strange household objects, I think part of Clover Robin’s Uncanny Transformation: Familiar Future. Small handmade books that made me think about DIY, technology in the home, craft, food and objects, esthetics.

The Textile Futures degree show will take place 18-25 June.

In the past year or so we’ve been encouraging our clients to see the use of RFID cards in a more creative light and being in London allows us to take advantage of the ubiquitous Oyster card as a tool for creative interactions in public contexts. Even if its uses are still heavily associated with security (passport IDs) and logistics (you’ll remember the traditional strip inside of a CD), RFID is a really interesting technology to build on and the drop in unit price (you can get away with about 60p per card these days) means that they can be made for bespoke projects and be disposed of or re-purposed in interesting ways.

For YCN Live! last year, guests had received an RFID card with their invitation that allowed them through the door. Once inside, they were able to “tag” portfolio pieces from the 90 designers showcased that evening. A few days after the event, visitors would receive an email with some additional information and links to the portfolios of the works they had tagged. Think of it as outsourcing your memory of interesting pieces of content to a later date, allowing you to truly enjoy yourself and the bubbly on the evening itself.

The Oyster card is an interesting platform to build into interactive exhibitions. Very closely guarded in terms of technology, it’s also closely associated in people’s minds to money, data and security. We simply see it as a convenient way to get random numbers that make sense from a technology perspective but from an experience point of view it can appear unique. Basically each card has it’s own unique number which can be read with a simple RFID reader. What you decide to do with that number can go from simply triggering something, waking it up, or randomly affecting a visual, a display, a light.

For example: Snowflakes was designed so that people in our building would generate their own unique snowflake and be able to see the last person’s design. Knowing that each person has a unique number means the snowflakes can be generated differently every time.

The same principle was applied to Arup’s Force Field installation we were asked to work on. Allowing people from outside and inside the building to use their Oyster card to trigger a simple yet random colour choice made it more responsive and appealing to passer-bys. The experience of discovering what lies behind a simple everyday object can become a great way to engage people.

Beyond simply choosing to alter an existing design or parameter in a random way, using a card can also simply visualise a choice that’s been made by a user. Daniel Soltis, our interaction designer who is quite keen on games and game design built a lovely Photo-booth game for the Free Art Giveaway event in London last fall. Users were able to see their faces inside of a bubble and use their Oyster card when they wanted the picture to be taken. A camera would then take a few pictures of the visitor and add it to a growing pile of bubbles from other visitors. The color of the bubbles if they were similar, would make them pop and move down the screen, not unlike the classic game of Tetris. Here the card acts as a way to say “now please” and nothing more while adding a little playfulness to the final result.

There are really more to RFID than identity and I really feel that its all about levels of disclosure and action you can give a user with those cards or tags that makes or breaks an interaction. The more information you give someone, the more surprise, curiosity and emotion will be generated and you’ll make sure to get everyone to interact with a creative piece of work beyond what they first see or perceive.

++ We’ve very sorry to see the guys from Physical Interaction Lab have closed shop :(((

++ Fabulous geek and maker videos with Fat Man and Circuit Girl.

++ Interesting new lighting product from Lumiblade

++ Nice use of materials like wax and lighting by Parsons student Myriam Aboukhater.

++ On the Personal Informatics end of the spectrum, Christian Nold is launching his book called Emotional Cartography: Technologies of the Self

“Emotional Cartography is a collection of essays from artists, designers, psychogeographers,
cultural researchers, futurologists and neuroscientists, brought together by Christian Nold, to
explore the political, social and cultural implications of visulising intimate biometric data and
emotional experiences using technology.”

++ David Hayward’s addressable milk bottles kinda reminds me of the classic Droog milk bottle chandelier, but with a twist.

++ Watch 11 year old kids learning about Arduino through stuffed toys!

++ Beautiful actuators-based sculptures by Choe U Ram. Check out the videos.

++ Interesting conference called I Realise in Torino this June that includes a whole track called “I Move & Interact”.

++ Tweenbots is the brainchild of ITP student Kacie Kinzer and I’m totally in love with it.

Tweenbots are human-dependent robots that navigate the city with the help of pedestrians they encounter. Rolling at a constant speed, in a straight line, Tweenbots have a destination displayed on a flag, and rely on people they meet to read this flag and to aim them in the right direction to reach their goal.

If you pick up the latest edition of .Cent Magazine at your local Borders this spring, have a look at page 35. After having given a presentation and some demos of our work at the BFI on music and electronics, the guys at .Cent very generously offered me to write a short article on the subject on a section of this beautiful publication dedicated to Daphne Oram. Check it out!

I like to experiment with event formats and after Makers & Hackers I thought it might be fun to try something for the Milan Furniture Fair as we’ll be part of the Milano Green Art Festival.

Having a background in product design makes the Fair quite an exhausting experience. Once you’ve seen 10 new tables designs, you’ve seen them all. So Massimo and I thought that it would be great to organise an event that was centered around turning the design activity upside down: from one single designer with a new product to an open audience using left-over materials or commonly known as junk :)

So on April 18th if you’re in London or Milan, we’ll be opening our respective offices up and getting crazy creative types to come in and make a piece of lighting with materials we will have collected in charity shops, landfill shops and other strange places…. you don’t have to know electronics as you can use the guts of a regular lamp but this is totally DIY and you’ll have to bring some of your own stuff too….

As we did for Makers and Hackers, we’ll select the best pieces at the end of the day and display them as part of our presence at the Milan Green Art Festival.

Tickets are just £30 to cover for materials and a little lunch. Hope you’ll join us!!!

++ Interesting to see that the Reactvision guys are productising into an “experience”.

++ Lovely Arduino project called the Bakertweet from the lovely guys at Poke London. Pings you on your iPhone if you’re around freshly baked goods and twitters what’s fresh out of the over…omnomnom